Officials from Xavier University of Louisiana and Ochsner Health announced on Monday (April 29) that the planned Xavier Ochsner College of Medicine campus will be located in Benson Tower in New Orleans’ Central Business District. The event, attended by New Orleans Saints and Benson Tower owner Gayle Benson, U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell and members of the New Orleans City Council, was held on Benson Tower’s fifth floor, the same floor where the school will be located.
At the event, Reynold Verret, president of Xavier University of Louisiana, and Pete November, CEO of Ochsner Health, signed a legal agreement making the partnership between the university and the health provider for the medical school official.
Dr. Leonardo Seoane was also announced as the medical school’s first dean at the event. Seoane is an executive vice president at Ochsner, where he’s worked since 2002, and its chief academic officer.
Many of the speakers at the press conference spoke about the significance of creating this medical school, which will be the fifth at an historically black college or university in the United States and only in the Gulf South, to help address health care inequities that fall along racial lines. The timing for the opening of the school is not clear. Neither officials with Xavier nor Ochsner mentioned an expected opening date for the medical campus during Monday’s signing event.
“Ochsner and Xavier will both seek to address the longstanding healthcare injustices and foster a more robust, healthier community in pursuit of that vision,” Reynold Verret, president of Xavier University of Louisiana, said at the beginning of the event.
According to a report released by the health equity organization Commonwealth Fund on April 18, Louisiana performed lower than the national average for how Black and Latinx people in the state fare in the state’s health system. Seoane, who is Cuban American, spoke about the importance of receiving care from doctors who are part of the same racial group as the patients.
“Our mission to train physicians that represent the communities they serve is critically urgent,” Seoane said at the event. Moments later, he shared about being a first-generation immigrant from Cuba and how becoming the first in his family to graduate college and then medical school was transformational for him and his family.
“The Xavier Osher College of Medicine will transform generations of young black and brown lives,” he said. “They will experience the transformational power of a STEM education and of a life in service [to] others.”
The building, bought by the late Tom Benson in 2009, was already home to 100,000 square feet of office space for Ochsner Health, according to Holly & Smith Architects. Several of the speakers mentioned the ambition to create a “BioDistrict” in New Orleans, an economic development plan to attract companies specializing in the biological sciences and medicine to the Central Business District. They hope that Xavier and Ochsner’s partnership to create the medical school will further that plan by attracting students, professors and companies to the area.
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